Moon flags likely lost their stripes

This annotated image released by NASA shows a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera view of the American flag at the Apollo 16 site on the moon. (NASA / Arizona State University / AFP / Getty Images)

Despite harsh conditions and the ravages of time, the U.S. flags planted on the moon in the past 43 years are still standing and casting shadows at all but one of the landing sites. This remarkable fact comes to us via images made recently by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, a robotic spacecraft orbiting the moon on a 3-D mapping mission.

Scientists have long speculated that all the flags except for one planted during the Apollo missions were still there, based on their shadows, reports rawstory.com.

But the flags are probably not red, white and blue anymore, as Paul D. Spudis pointed out for symbolism in his airspacemag.com blog post about the end of the shuttle era a year ago:

Over the course of the Apollo program, our astronauts deployed six American flags on the Moon. For forty-odd years, the flags have been exposed to the full fury of the Moon’s environment – alternating 14 days of searing sunlight and 100° C heat with 14 days of numbing-cold -150° C darkness. But even more damaging is the intense ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the pure unfiltered sunlight on the cloth (modal) from which the Apollo flags were made. Even on Earth, the colors of a cloth flag flown in bright sunlight for many years will eventually fade and need to be replaced. So it is likely that these symbols of American achievement have been rendered blank, bleached white by the UV radiation of unfiltered sunlight on the lunar surface. Some of them may even have begun to physically disintegrate under the intense flux.

America is left with no discernible space program while the Moon above us no longer flies a visible U.S. flag. How ironic.

The only Apollo landing site with no standing flag is the first one, Apollo 11′s. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin reported that the flag was blown over by the exhaust from the ascent engine during liftoff.

In this April 1972 photo, astronaut John W. Young, commander of the Apollo 16 lunar landing mission, salutes the U.S. flag at the Descartes landing site during an extravehicular activity. The Lunar Module ‘Orion’ is on the left with the Lunar Roving Vehicle parked beside. (NASA / AFP PHOTO / HANDOUT)